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I am very happy to share updates from Hyderabad 2.0 & Jaipur versions of Marketplace Day & the impact of these events till now.

Marketplace Day Hyderabad 2.0

This was nice to see the collab house again full of energy the night after the first version of this series. In discussion with the marketplace team before the event we figured out that this time we had less number of ready-to-pick good first bugs, so we didn’t invite much attendees. The room with 15 odd code passionate coders witnessed the coding, food & fun whole night. We worked on 9 bugs that night and our contributors filed/fixed more than 15 bugs during the event and in the rest of the month. Here are links of photo album and event etherpad.

Marketplace Day Jaipur

This was the best of all three MPDay events we have organized till date. Here is the summary of this event-

Our of total 35 attendees, 35 successfully set up Fireplace before event itself

Mozilla always had a clear goal of keeping the Web as the most powerful public resource, and keeping web open and accessible for anyone. Mozilla was formed when there was a threat to openness of web, and till today Mozilla is proudly standing there for the web. Firefox OS was also launched by Mozilla to give users one more choice in the mobile world as well. Mozilla recently introduced concept of including MOW (Mobile Optimized Web) into Firefox Marketplace (app store for Firefox OS). This concept is simply about ‘Expanding the Marketplace catalogue to include a curated set of mobile-optimized websites’ for better discoverability of content on mobile devices.

Mozilla includes ‘Mobile Optimized Websites’ along with apps into its app store Marketplace.

But I see this project as another big initiative by Mozilla towards keeping web powerful and not a project to including websites with apps on its Markerplace. Here Mozilla is standing with web to make sure the web is not affected by the power apps eco-system is getting today.

Today, the mobile apps eco-system is growing exponentially and has been accepted very well by public. At the same time I think the power which the apps eco-system is getting today, is a potential threat to web. I am not at all worried (and this will definitely not happen) that web will be completely overtaken by app world. Now what is problem with apps eco-system? I do not see any issue with apps world, but web should not be affected from this. The main problem with app world is that this is owned by few giant powerful hands, this is not open and public resource as web is. If people keep shutting down their websites in favour of apps, we will not have any public resource which is not owned by anyone, but all of us.

When a user clicks on an icon and access the content for a purpose, he actually cares for better UX mostly. He will not have any concerns whether he is accessing an app or a website. This is the reason, Mozilla is including mobile optimized sites also in the marketplace. With including websites on marketplace, the users will definitely get more better results for their searches which will give them better search experience. You can read more about MOW on Mozilla blog or on its Mozilla wiki page.

In short, introducing MOW into Marketplace should:

Give mobile optimized websites equal importance as it is given to apps on mobile world.

Help users discover content that they want through a seamless discovery experience between apps and the web on mobile devices.

Help catalyse the move to the web as the platform for mobile devices.

Utilize the collective wisdom of our community, for the benefit of our community, to bring the best of the web to everyone.

The last month was really exciting, will better say that this was a month of recognition.

Marketplace team selects one contributor every month for recognition as ‘Friend of Marketplace’, and in June I was the one chosen for this title. Read the full article on Mozilla’s app blog. To nominate yourself or someone else for this title, you can submit they contribution at monthly wiki page, find more details at Marketplace wiki page.

Marketplace Day Hyderabad, the first ever regional marketplace code contribution event, was really a big success. I was really honoured to see my name as Friend of Mozilla an the next project meeting. You can read all notes of this meeting on this wiki page.

I am feeling proud to write about the first event regional marketplace community building event ‘Marketplace Day’ organized by us in Hyderabad. Unlike its name, it was actually an over night event 😉 and 25 enthusiastic participants and volunteers (who were curated based on their application form) woke up whole night to work on marketplace bugs. You can read full report about the event flow and report at my post on Mozilla India blog. Here I would like to put the summary and special mentions about the event.

As a summary, the event was all about –

25 Hackers with open eyes whole night

15 Night Hours of Fun

15 Bugs targeted

11 Pull Requests

5 New Bugs filed

Undoubtedly everyone did an amazing job to make this event a super success, I would like to mention few participants here for their special contributions to the event –

Ravi Teja took a quick session to introduce Git during the event, fixed bugs and provided lot of help to fellow participants.

Ever wondered how volunteers contribute to code base of open source ? Do you want to be one. Here is the opportunity – Marketplace Day (Hyderabad), an event completely dedicated to Mozilla’s Firefox Marketplace Code Contribution. If you are in and around Hyderabad India, please join us for the event.

We will learn

We will learn things necessary for getting started with code-base contribution